Among other instances of collateral damage, Miley Cyrus' controversial performance at MTV’s Video Music Awards in August familiarized thousands with Molly, the powdered form of MDMA that is a popular recreational choice at parties and concerts.

When the final day of the Electric Zoo festival at Randall’s Island was canceled a week later, the drug was back in the news — Molly was blamed for the two deaths that prompted organizers to shut down the event. Fans of hip-hop and club music needed no introduction to Molly: rappers have been rhyming about it for a few years now. It complements (but in no way replaces) promethazine with codeine, psychedelics and high-grade marijuana as a substance praised in popular song.

Country music pretends toward wholesomeness, but mostly just picks a different poison. The modern country album is crammed with hard-drinking anthems; in concert, the entreaties to grab a bottle or a brew just get louder and more persistent.

Genre to genre, subculture to subculture, the messages have converged: Music sounds better when it is accompanied by an intoxicant. A listener under the influence is free to lose herself into the groove, dissolve into sound, reach for transcendence. Musicians rhapsodize about Molly, weed, beer, amphetamines; they invent new code names for old vices. When they drop those names into songs, everybody cheers.

But wait a second, party people. Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending Cissy Houston’s birthday services at New Hope Baptist Church in Newark. A procession of stars arrived to perform, including Stevie Wonder and Darlene Love, but even before anybody world-famous stepped in the pulpit, the congregation was going mad to the sound of the 100-voice New Hope choir. People were shouting, clapping; some sang along; others leapt to their feet and danced in the aisles. It was difficult to believe that there was any variety of music-induced abandon that superseded what I was witnessing.

Midway through the services, it occurred to me: It was 9 o’clock in the morning. This was not a rave or a basement rock club, and the people gathered to hear the music and celebrate Houston’s birthday weren’t all kids. They were under the influence of sound and sentiment, and exegesis from the pastor. There was no bar in the back and there didn’t need to be one.

Go to concerts and you’re bound to get plied. The logic is seductive and the pushers can be persuasive. You’ll be at a show, and somebody in the audience or, more likely, onstage, will attempt to convince you that your experience is incomplete if you aren’t appropriately drugged. The ecstasy embedded in music can only be accessed if you take the right chemical. Gospel is your proof that this is a lie. Everything about Hezekiah Walker’s "Every Praise," the song that has been at the top of the gospel chart for weeks, is designed to elicit a cathartic, ecstatic reaction — exactly the kind of altered state that rockers and ravers chase. The difference is that Walker doesn’t cheat. Certain as he is that the spirits in the bottle are infinitely overmatched by the spirit above, he requires no crutch.

At this year’s Gospelfest concert at the Prudential Center in Newark, in May, Walker took the stage with his massive Love Fellowship Tabernacle choir from Brooklyn. (Another attractive thing about gospel is that even the biggest stars are often right there, Sunday after Sunday, in the pulpits of churches they’ve built themselves.) He and his group only performed two songs, but they were extended to a half hour of rapturous music. The edited version of "Every Praise" still pushes past the six-minute mark; the great one goes on for more than 12. Walker stuffs his song with as many false endings, modulations, calls-and-responses and drum breakdowns as he can get away with. Every time it seems like he’s taken the relatively simple chord progression as far as it can go, he finds another gear.

His message of total surrender to divine authority is underscored by music that extracts and spotlights the most bombastic elements from ’80s arena rock. It barely matters. Walker proceeds with absolute faith in the power of the music, and insists that there’s something holy to discover within the song’s unabashed maximalism — and maybe its predictability, too. No key is required to open the door. All you need has been provided.